From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Sep 18 19:45:09 2005 Return-Path: X-Original-To: questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1072116A41F for ; Sun, 18 Sep 2005 19:45:09 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from e.schuele@computer.org) Received: from rwcrmhc12.comcast.net (rwcrmhc12.comcast.net [216.148.227.85]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D211F43D45 for ; Sun, 18 Sep 2005 19:45:08 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from e.schuele@computer.org) Received: from [192.168.214.218] (c-24-1-232-64.hsd1.tx.comcast.net[24.1.232.64]) by comcast.net (rwcrmhc12) with ESMTP id <200509181945070140010cd5e>; Sun, 18 Sep 2005 19:45:08 +0000 Message-ID: <432DC3C2.7090206@computer.org> Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2005 14:45:06 -0500 From: Eric Schuele User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.6 (X11/20050908) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: dick hoogendijk References: <20050918133429.35e96a73.dick@nagual.st> In-Reply-To: <20050918133429.35e96a73.dick@nagual.st> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: fbsdq Subject: Re: what was it ? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2005 19:45:09 -0000 dick hoogendijk wrote: > I know it is off topic, but I trust you guys in this group to just > remember it. > > I'm building an old msdos machine for a little kid (very nostalgic). > But I seem to rememeber that there was an issue about the space of the > harddrive. Some kind of limit I don't remember. How large can a ms-dos > partition be? > Per KB Article 118335 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q118335/ Microsoft MS-DOS versions 4.0 and later allow FDISK to partition hard disks up to 4 gigabytes (GB) in size. However, the MS-DOS file allocation table (FAT) file system can support only 2 GB per partition. Because of this fact, a hard disk between 2 and 4 GB in size must be broken down into multiple partitions, each of which does not exceed 2 GB. FAT file system is limited to 65,525 clusters. The size of a cluster must be a power of 2 and less than 65,536 bytes--this results in a maximum cluster size of 32,768 bytes (32K). Multiplying the maximum number of clusters (65,525) by the maximum cluster size (32,768) equals 2 GB. Note that the hard disk drive must be supported by the computer's ROM BIOS APIs, which have a 1024-cylinder limitation, in order for FDISK to partition the hard disk. HTH -- Regards, Eric